Transfer Health Data to a New iPhone

I’m the proud owner of a new iPhone 7. So far, I love it! It feels kind of like a living creature to me and it’s pretty cool to imagine some kind of HR Giger-style nightmare machine taking notes and waking you up.

After the usual amount of phone activation headaches, I thought all was well until I went to log something in the newly redesigned Apple Health and found that all my data was missing. Yikes!

If you’re like me and spent a lot of time logging and checking various health stats, here’s a way to make sure you transfer them to a new device:

Back up your old device to iTunes, not iCloud

I discovered that backing up to iCloud wirelessly saves “only your most important data.” Apparently, that doesn’t mean health data. Maybe it’s a security thing (probably a security thing) but it’s kind of a pain.

Of course, this also means that any number of things aren’t being saved and won’t be transferred over to your new iPhone. Before you switch over, plug your old phone into iTunes and create a backup that way.

Create an encrypted backup

Whoa whoa whoa. Hold on there, cowboy.

Remember how I said not everything is backed up as a security precaution? Here’s the thing:

You won’t back everything up unless you create an encrypted backup.

Besides being pretty fast and super secure, encrypted backups save a lot more of your precious mobile bits, including many passwords and even browsing data.